Halcyone eBook

“She is not nearly so attractive-looking as
she used to be. If I remember, she was rather
a weirdly pretty child.”

“Just a chrysalis now,” grunted the professor
between [**TR Note: was betwen in original; typesetter’s
error.] puffs of smoke. “But there is more
true philosophy and profound knowledge of truth in
that little head than either you or I have got in
ours, John.”

“You always thought the world of her, Master—­you,
with your ineradicable contempt for women!”

“She is not a woman—­yet. She
is an intelligence and a brain—­and a soul.”

“Oh, she has a soul, then!” and John Derringham
smiled. “I remember once you said when
I should meet a woman with a soul I should meet my
match! I do not feel very alarmed.”

One of the Professor’s penthouse brows raised
itself about half an inch, but he did not speak.

“In which school have you taught her?”
John Derringham asked—­“you who are
so much of a cynic, Master. Does she study the
ethics of Aristotle with you here in this Lyceum,
or do you reconstruct Plato’s Academy? She
is no sophist, apparently, since you say she can see
the truth.”

Mr. Carlyon looked into the fire.

“She is almost an Epicurean, John, in all but
the disbelief in the immortality of the soul.
She has evolved a theory of her own about that.
It partakes of Buddhism. After I have discussed
metaphysical propositions with her over which she
will argue clearly, she will suddenly cut the whole
knot with a lightning flash, and you see the naked
truth, and words become meaningless, and discussion
a jest.”

“All this, at fifteen!” John Derringham
laughed antagonistically, and then he suddenly remembered
her words to himself upon honor in the tree that summer
morning three years ago, and he mused.

Perhaps some heaven-taught beings were allowed to
come to earth after all, now and then as the centuries
rolled on.

“She knows Greek pretty well?” he asked.

“Fairly, for the time she has learnt. She
can read me bits of Lucian. She would stumble
over the tragedies. I read them to her.”
Then he continued, as though it were a subject he
loved, “She has a concrete view upon every question;
her critical faculty is marvelous. She never
lays down the law, but if you ask her, you have your
answer in a nutshell, the simplest truth, which it
always appears to her so strange that you have not
seen all the time.”

“What is her parentage? Heredity plays
so large a part in these things,” Mr. Derringham
asked.

“The result of a passionate love-match between
distant cousins of that fine old race, I believe.
Timothy La Sarthe was at Oxford before your day, but
not under me—­a brilliant, enchanting fellow,
drowned while yachting when my little friend was only
a few months old.”

“And the mother?”

“Married again to pay his debts, to a worthy
stockbroker, almost immediately, I believe. She
paid the debt with herself and died after having three
children for him in a few years.”